


Stay

by ofvanity



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Character Death, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Infidelity, M/M, Magical Realism, Mental Instability, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-05
Updated: 2014-11-05
Packaged: 2018-02-24 05:55:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2570582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofvanity/pseuds/ofvanity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a lot of names for what he does and who he does it to, but to Arthur, it's just Death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stay

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Inception Reverse Bang Challenge, in accompaniment to the magnificent art by velificantes, [Stage Blood Is Not Enough](http://velificantes.tumblr.com/post/94345952990/beware-the-friendly-stranger-second-submission).

Arthur does not dream. He can never remember having the ability to dream. Even before Dreamshare started and before he developed a Somnacin dependency, he never dreamed. Outside the space of conscious effort to produce projections, which is what he uses for jobs, there is nothing. The void makes his sleep short and restless, so some nights he doesn’t sleep. He wanders.

Mal finds Arthur in the children’s room one night. It was not a strange sight, he’d been staying at their house for about a week, filling in the guest room. But he wasn’t in his room when she went for him and she found him in their room, sitting beside Phillipa in her bed. He doesn’t turn when she says his name, doesn’t move.

“They are so peaceful when they sleep,” she says, sighs, and leans against the doorway. The soles of her feet ache and her eyelids are heavy. “Is everything ok with you?”

He moves then, stands from the bed and towards her, framed only by the nightlight near James’ bed. The cut of his shadow crosses the room. “I’m fine, just late night wandering. You going to bed?”

She nods, pressing the pads of her fingers into her eyes, “Dominic just went to lay down.”

“I’ll see you in the morning then,” he says, leading her into the hallway to shut the children’s door.

“Good night, Arthur,” she says, rubbing his shoulder distractedly before walking away.

At the end of the hall, the door shuts and Arthur stands in the darkened hallway, counting his breaths until he hears Mal slide between the covers. There is sand in his nails and the grains catch against his skin.

The children are already asleep and dreaming of candy stores and bottomless ice cream cones. Even the nightmares they have are short-lived and innocent: a stranger standing in the park, a house fire that melts their dollhouses, or spilling water on important documents and incurring the wrath of their usually gentle grandparents. They’re too young for much else. Phillipa is only three years old, James just reached 18 months.

Nightmares come with age, Arthur has found. He hasn’t found this to be a rule of the universe, but a pattern. Most of the times that Arthur has intervened on a nightmare for a child, it is an older child. James and Phillipa still have time.

In the room at the end of the hall, Mal is restless, tossing and turning, not likely to fall asleep soon. Cobb is soundly asleep beside her, dreaming of a circus he saw once as a child. He doesn’t usually dream, so Arthur will leave him to it. They’ll both wake up in four hours or so and then try sleep again. In the second cycle, Arthur can come back.

For now, he slips his hands into his pockets, finding sand inside them as well, and heads downstairs. He hasn’t slept in three days, and he’s not tired, but there’s little else to do in the world at this time of night. He may as well.

-

Most mornings, the kids are fed and dressed and passed over to a daycare center based in one of the homes down the block. Arthur follows dutifully after Mal, who’s carrying James, holding Phillipa’s hand and listening to her Birthday Wish List for eight months from now.

The woman who runs the daycare has a beautiful home and is certified in CPR. There are degrees hanging on the wall and a surly-looking teenager but ultimately, Mal knows them and is happy to leave the children behind. On the way home, she throws an arm around Arthur’s shoulders, wrinkling his jacket and sighs heavily with relief. “Oh, look at me Arthur, I can hear my own thoughts.”

“Must be pretty quiet then, huh?”

She laughs at him, “You’d know all about it, wouldn’t you?”

Arthur shrugs minutely, adjusting his jacket as she slips away, practically skipping home, “Just from what your husband has told me.”

Mal glares at him, dead serious until her grin breaks, ecstatic, “I don’t have a good comeback.”

Arthur shakes his head at her in faux disappointment and she shoves him softly. They walk back to the house in a comfortable chatter that dies down once they get close to the house. Mal loops her arm in Arthur’s when they get to the front step. She’s wearing flip-flops and they slap noisily against her feet and the wooden steps up the front porch. They’re not even inside and already the mood is changing.

Mal pauses with a hand on the door. She turns to him and the bags under her eyes have darkened overnight, “Thank you for coming to do this with us, Arthur.”

Arthur doesn’t say anything, just nods.

Dom is inside, awake already and restless with the itch to dream again. He’s cooking breakfast for them but ends up rushing them through the meal. Today, Mal and Dom are scheduled to drop three levels and stay under for two hours. When they awake, they will have been dreaming for almost five months.

-

Mal dreams the same way she brushes her hair. She begins with rough strokes, to create a basic shape, then contouring the shape together with detailed combs, ripping through knots with frustrated tugs and finishing it all with her fingers, searching for the snags. Arthur’s watched it before, both the dreaming and the hair brushing, and the products are always different. He drops into their dream, when they should be two weeks in.

They are living on a ranch, surrounded by mountains when Arthur finds them. Dom is sitting at the center of a canyon, cutting rocks away from the Earth and turning them into Frank Gehry horror shows. Mal is sitting at the top of the canyon, wearing oversized sunglasses and looking bored. If Arthur remembers correctly, she prefers waterscapes much more.

Dom and Mal’s projections are milling about, disinterested in the shape of the canyon, mostly in the form of tourist families. Arthur walks among them and only steps outside of the group when Mal spots him. She’s excited to see him and hugs him tightly, arms thrown around him. “Arthur I’m so glad you’re here, I haven’t seen you in so long.”

Mal slips an arm through his like she does topside and he follows her lead away from the center of the canyon. In the time they’ve spent under, Dom and Mal have been building and breaking mountains and rock formations. She takes him one over, a jagged cliff face with a variety of odd ends that make it easy to climb. Fortunately for them, Mal extends it out and creates a walking path.

They make it halfway up and a ledge opens into a fork. The immediate left leads to a path to the top and the opening presents a cave. As the sun begins to set, Arthur encourages Mal to settle for the time being. Arthur’s dreamed himself up some half-hearted hiking equipment and sets a blanket down on the ledge so they can watch the sunset.

In this dream, Dom’s sun is red, casting pink and a vibrant purple in the clouds as it sets. “Oh look at those cloud shapes, Dominic is such a five year old with a coloring book sometimes.”

“I like them,” Arthur says minutely.

“You would, Icarus.” Mal remarks lightly, mouth around her canteen.

“I’m not an Icarus,” he replies. “Dominic is an Icarus.”

“And what am I?”

Arthur shrugs, looking away. “Daedalus.”

“Oh,” Mal teases, canteen set aside, “How cryptic and mysterious of you, Arthur.”

He chuckles, “Just keeping up with you, Mal.”

“How am I being mysterious or cryptic?”

Arthur gestures to the blanket and the sunset. “You brought me up here, not the other way around.”

Mal turns to look at him, almost sharp, almost suspicious. “And what of it.”

Arthur sniffs, shrugging. There’s nothing to say about it, they are shoulder to shoulder, knees knocking together with every shuffle. Yet, there’s room on the blanket, room on the ledge, room in the canyon with Cobb. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Arthur,” she says, softly, like she might start a speech letting him down easy, but when he turns to face her, she doesn’t look remorseful. She doesn’t break his gaze. “Tell me differently,” he dares her.

Instead she leans forward. “Kiss me.”

Topside, it takes longer. On a night when everyone in the house is asleep already. After weeks of having dreams with Arthur’s projection, sleeping more and resting less, chasing after toddlers during the day, Mal finds Arthur in the pantry one night.

He’s thinking of making a sandwich for himself. Since Mal and Dom have been dreaming, they’ve neglected the shopping and there’s not much else to eat. He’s holding a jar of peanut butter in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other, looking for jelly. He turns to find her in the doorway and neither of them speaks for a moment. He sets the food down on a shelf and looks concerned. “Is everything okay?”

She nods softly, and crosses the threshold. She crowds into his space, holding him against a shelf and he can feel her pulse racing when he takes her wrist in an aborted gesture to stop her. “Mal?”

She kisses him firmly on the mouth. A thrill runs through his spine and he feels so alive, it almost makes him laugh. Instead, he lets her push him against the shelves, kissing until his body can’t breathe and then a second longer. When they part, her eyes are bright with mischief. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for you to do that.”

-

There’s an edge to Arthur’s mouth that doesn’t exist in the waking world. It’s the body that was given to him, built with young eyes and young bones that make all of his movements seem innocent, unassuming. He used to hate it but now he’s come to terms with it. He’s always going to be carded at bars, he may as well own it.

The thing is, though, the edge of his mouth curls with smiles in this life. He’s even got dimples and teeth like a military cemetery. Outside of his body, Arthur’s teeth reflect the thousands of graves he’s walked over. Cemeteries aren’t even fun for him anymore, just another recycled altar to the dead.

But sometimes, the living can see it. It’s always a surprise.

He’s walking to the store for milk and eggs, a crumpled twenty in one hand and the sore ache of a recently removed cannula inside his wrist. He spent the day dreaming with Dom but they woke up in time for Mal to go pick up the kids and Arthur to pick up some food. It looks like pizza again for dinner tonight.

Inside his pocket, he’s distinctly aware of the die shaking back and forth with his strides. He was dreaming for three months but woke up to the change of a few hours. It’s disorienting to say the least. The last thing he expects to find is a cashier with a rosary around his neck. Eyeing Arthur with a scowl.

Meetings like these don’t happen often, there’s always a hint of hesitation whenever someone gets a bad vibe from him. Truthfully, he knows that it’s inevitable. There are always dogs barking at him and people tend to trust dog’s instincts before they’ve examined their own. Arthur bows his head and pays for the food but thinks about it on the entire walk home.

He’s been so well fed in the Cobb household, he’s probably glowing. Mal just loves to give, it seems, because every time Dom turns his back she’s wrapped around his waist, around his dreams. She keeps dropping further and further with him, for longer and longer, and Dom is doing nothing to discourage it. The Cobbs are both so caught up in their creative pursuits, neither of them recognizes the downward spiral.

The spiral isn’t the hard part, it’s the willingness to accept it that always snags people.

For a snack, Arthur fixes the kids some sandwiches. For dinner, he orders a pizza. By the time they’re heading to bed and Dom is stumbling upstairs, Mal is at Arthur’s side yet again.

It’s been weeks and her dream with Dom tomorrow will put them under for five years dreamtime. He turns her down for the night, feigning fear over Dom’s potential discovery of their affair. When he reaches his bedroom, however, he almost wished he hadn’t.

There’s a horsefly in his room, flying in panicked orbit around the light bulb. Arthur rubs his eyes, hazy with the exhaustion of faking a dream and sighs. He’s not going to get sleep with the fly buzzing around. He’s going to have to deal with this.

He runs downstairs to grab an empty jar from the cupboards and catches the horsefly between his hands in one swift movement. Arthur makes sure to secure the top and sets the jar on the nightstand, while Inside, the fly is buzzing, and inside his head, a headache hums to life.

He shrugs his suit jacket on and makes a quick stop into the children’s room, checking for nightmares, and then heads out. The jar is inside his satchel, bumping glass against glass delicately with the jostle of his stride. He always forgets to take the empty jars out.

The walk doesn’t take Arthur far, the horseflies never stray from their place of death, and he sets himself on the curb on a deserted street, trying to concentrate. Inside his mind, he opens himself to the humming and slowly the sound distorts until it is clear against his skull. The voice is a woman and when she speaks, her body finds light to cast a silhouette on the dark road.

In the jar, the horsefly is dead.

“Hello,” Arthur says calmly, “Care to explain yourself?”

The woman, Kelly, in her mid-thirties, dressed in thick-rimmed glasses and a striped dress, prods at her own body experimentally. Her hands touch nothing and feel nothing. She’s mostly Arthur’s projection of the humming. “What’s wrong with me?”

There’s no tactful way to inform her so he sighs. He prefers it when they’ve become aware of their own death. “You’re dead.”

“What kind of sick joke--”

He cuts her off with the memory of her death, a motorcycle crash that rendered her unconscious instantly. She was DOA when the paramedics arrived. It was only two days ago, she might not even have had burial services yet.

“Who are you? _What_ are you?”

There are a lot of names for what Arthur is and a lot of names for what Arthur is not, each less creative than the last. Over the years, plenty have come and gone. The Sandman was a personal favorite, even though it grossly underestimated Arthur’s power, it made him feel like a superhero.

“I’m Lucifer.”

The woman watches him with wide eyes and her mouth opens to whisper, “Really?”

The edge of fear in her voice is not even amusing. “No.”

There was once a religious sect in a Scottish village that worshipped him as a merciful god after he’d slipped hints of his ability. The village elders taught the youngest to sing songs about him and the parents would kneel in front of him as he passed in the town square. It was infuriating and so he set their village ablaze and moved onto the next town.

“I’m Arthur.”

If Arthur had to write a resume explaining the omnipotence and rage inside his head, it would only read one word: _Death_.

-

After two weeks of dropping into month long dreams with Mal and Dom, Arthur decides to leave. He’s been cutting away at their minds for years by now but they are approaching the point of no return and Arthur can’t be here when they do. He’s got to get on a flight to Paris and spend some time corroborating his story with other people. He’ll need hotel receipts and flirtatious waitresses to remember him ordering at their restaurants. He’ll need to get kicked out of pubs and make friends with taxicab drivers.

The day he leaves, Dom sits down on his bed in his room at the break of dawn. Arthur is organizing the last of his stuff, trying to figure out if he’s forgotten anything. Dom looks exhausted but also very aware and awake. “Why are you leaving?”

Arthur shrugs, “Bored.”

Dom fixes him a glare that indicates he’s not falling for it. “You’re bored of pushing the heights of Dreamshare farther than we’ve ever gone before? You’re bored of intense neurological research? Or you’re bored with me?”

Arthur laughs, shaking his head, “It’s not all about you, Cobb. Hate to break it to you.”

“Then what is it?”

Arthur thinks of Mal, gasping soft moans into his ear when he fucked her on the kitchen counter two nights ago. He can still feel the heat from her skin, the pressure of her demanding kiss. She’s everywhere on him, and everywhere he turns in the house. He needed to leave anyway but when he thinks of her perfume and his heart beats faster, he really needs to get out.

“If you really must know, I’m just done playing domesticated kitten with you all,” he gestures around the room. “This is making me get hives. Didn’t I tell you the other day that I picked up the mail and the mailman knows me? His name is Jared, Cobb, did you know that?”

“Course I do, Jared’s a good guy.”

“I’m out of here, Dom. I’m going to go live a bachelor life in Paris and maybe I’ll be back in a few weeks.”

Cobb sighs, shifting to stand up and brush himself off. He’s still wearing the pajamas he’s had on since Tuesday. “Alright, alright. Go be lecherous and young. Call me and remind me what that’s like.”

Arthur laughs, “Yeah, as if I could top your undying devotion to your Beatrice downstairs.”

“I do love that woman.”

Arthur hugs him, clapping his back affectionately. “I know, I know.”

-

Yusuf is sitting backwards on a chair in his apartment, wearing only a wifebeater and black slacks when Arthur lets himself in. He’s in Greece vacationing, and Arthur just loves that he didn’t have to stick his nose into Mombasa because he hates the hot weather. Still, Greece isn’t much better, and Yusuf doesn’t like air conditioning, so his room is thick with humidity. There’s a fan in the corner whirring gently across the room and a woman in her underwear, reading a book.

Yusuf glances at him and turns back to the television. His tone is completely disinterested but he says, “Good morning, Arthur, do come in.”

Arthur sets his suit jacket on the back of a nearby chair and sits in it. “What are we watching?” he says by way of greeting.

The television is playing a movie in Spanish, and there is a small family moving into a large house. “Horror film,” Yusuf supplies. “This is Lila.”

“I’m Arthur,” he says, reaching out to shake her hand. Lila nods and smiles with a beautiful smile, and her bronzed skin glows in the sunlight. “Nice to meet you,” she replies, but turns back to her book immediately thereafter.

“What happened to Josefine?”

Yusuf shrugs, “I don’t know. She moved out of the country, I think. Didn’t say goodbye.”

Arthur makes an interested noise and they watch the rest of the film in silence. Towards the end of the movie, jump scares and plot point revelations pending, Yusuf smacks Arthur on the shoulder to get his attention. ‘Dinner after this?”

Outside, the sun has begun to set and casts a blood orange haze over the city and through their curtains. Arthur nods minutely, “Sure.”

Once the credits start rolling, Yusuf taps Lila on the shoulder, “Go get dressed, let’s get dinner.”

She doesn’t go very far, instead opting to slide a white sundress over her shoulders and slip on some sandals. Arthur leaves behind his suit jacket and they head out, heading towards the beachfront for a place to eat, chatting. Lila is an astrophysicist from Dubai and when Arthur asks about her research she smiles at him like he’s naive. He doesn’t mind.

They end up at a seafood restaurant, and stay late into the night, sipping cocktails and getting tipsy. Arthur can’t quite get drunk, but his body can stumble and slur words. It can hum gently with the heat of pleasure and retch when it comes to be too much. But his thought process can’t become impaired.

After dinner they strip off their clothes and swim in the sea, the glistening black water tumbling against their limbs. Yusuf can hardly walk straight anymore and Lila leads him into the water, laughing at his attempts to swim effectively. Even drunk, Lila is a strong swimmer and proves her chops while Arthur carries a wobbly Yusuf. Eventually, they head back to the hotel.

Arthur escorts them home and sets Yusuf on the couch, sending Lila to bed in the next room. He slaps Yusuf’s cheek softly, waking him up again. With wide eyes, Yusuf glares at him. “What is it?”

“Where’s Nash?”

Yusuf giggles. “I should’ve known you came for a meal.”

Arthur knows where Nash is, he’s just not sure he has an open invitation into Yusuf’s life. He always comes up with a reason in time, though. “I’m not going to eat him just tell me where he is.”

“I don’t know,” Yusuf sighs and sinks into the cushions, “Try Korea,” before promptly falling asleep.

Arthur takes his shoes off, grabs his suit jacket, and leaves.

There’s a horsefly in his jacket when he opens it to put it on and he catches it between his hands. He can feel the fluttering inside his palms and walks until the humming in his head is loud and slow.

This time, there’s an elderly black man in a residential area, sitting on the steps of a house with a wraparound porch. He’s got a grim set to his face and when Arthur touches the porch railing, he can feel the years of joy and warmth that comes with a family home. He knows he is dead and he knows he needs to go back beyond the veil that even Arthur can’t cross but he has to settle some things first.

“Will my family be okay?”

Inside the house, people are laughing and playing Grecian pop music. In the room upstairs, a teenager is rolling his eyes and trying to hold a phone call with his girlfriend. Arthur slips through their timelines to answer the man’s question. They have arduous years ahead and happy moments, childbirths and more family deaths. There is a shadow over them, the death of their grandfather, but Arthur can see their spirits and they are hopeful people.

“Yes,” he replies. “They’ll adjust.”

Even if it was a lie, he wasn’t going to tell this man the truths he sees. Arthur has a job to keep.

There are tears in his eyes and he asks Arthur, like they always do, “Are you God?”

“No,” Arthur says, drawing the man back into himself, back into the depth and beyond the veil, “I’m just the porter.”

The humming stops and the man is gone. In his hand, the horsefly is dead.

-

Arthur moves on to Paris afterwards, wandering the city for lack of else to do. He finds a niche in a cafe to people watch and spends most of his time there, drawing and taking notes. It’s innocuous people watching that makes for good dreamscape later. He befriends a young waitress with her hair shaved close to her head and stud earrings that flatter the symmetry of her face. Her name is Noelle, and when she gets off her shift every day, he has a new drawing waiting for her.

She laughs with her head thrown back when he shows her the day’s drawing. “Arthur! Don’t you feel like a creep, drawing pictures of people like this?”

The sketch he made today was of a young boy struggling to eat an eclair, chocolate and cream smeared on his face. He shrugs and makes a vague comment to hint he might have a photographic memory. She laughs like ripples and the people around her turn to watch her. He’s seen her timeline and it ends abruptly in her mid-thirties.

“Hey, so, I know you’re here eating and drinking coffee all day,” Noelle starts, her accent weighing heavily on her English.

“And drawing,” Arthur add, standing and leaving a 50 euro note for the next waitresses’ tip.

“ _Oui, et dessin_ ,” Noelle agrees, laughing.

They walk past the small black fence that separates the outdoor cafe from the sidewalk. He tucks his drawing pad under his arm.

“But maybe you want to eat and drink coffee with me somewhere else? On a date.”

Arthur stops her with a hand to her wrist on the street corner. His grin is genuine, “I’d love to.”

“How about Saturday? I have off tomorrow, so you will have a chance to miss me.”

Arthur feels a smile tugging the corners of his mouth. In eight years, Noelle will die of an aneurysm. “That sounds great. I’m staying at the Grand, you can meet me in the lobby at eight?”

Noelle’s smile is radiant, curled perfectly and a blush reddens her copper skin. “ _Oui_.”

The walk sign behind her changes and she bids her goodbyes with a kiss against Arthur’s cheeks and is gone in a flutter of her skirt. His skin is warm where she kissed him and he foregoes the cab to walk three miles back to his hotel.

By then, he’s exhausted and falls straight to sleep. His dreams are void, empty and infinite. They open with tendrils of his conscious mind seeping through, creating the necessary space for Arthur’s human self to rest. He leaves the human in a corner and reaches out for the glow of nearby minds.

Yusuf is still in Greece, and his glow is one of the brightest. Arthur will not feed from him, though because he’s on vacation, that would just be rude. In Paris, Miles’ light is the brightest, but the old man is too worn out already, feeding from him is tasteless. There are a couple other lights, one for Eames in the Pacific Islands, one from Nash in Southeast Asia, one for the human’s parents, beating in dark purple, already too drained.

He ignores all of them, however, and heads right into Mal and Dom’s warmth, an enveloping blanket of white-hot neuroactivity. They must be dreaming, he thinks, as he drops inside, and they are. The two of them are sitting in thrones made of vines in a jungle thick with red trees and dark branches. The jungle floor is vast and lively with the stir of a million imagined creatures.

He approaches their thrones from behind and feels through their bodies for the weakest points. Mal is too trusting and tumbles into his lap with the grace of a rose petal falling from the bloom. Dominic is too forgiving and he takes to Arthur like a dying man, on his knees with the force of Arthur’s intrusion. The two of them are asleep in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away, but the good news is that once Arthur has a taste for someone, there is no distance that can separate them.

Mal and Dom are not the first, and as their dream destabilizes and they drop into Limbo, Arthur reminds himself not to feel regretful. Mal and Dom will not be the last.

-

By the end of the night, Noelle’s cheeks are flushed with a rose tint raised on her brown skin. Arthur is watching the spread of her smile and debating the cause when his phone rings. He ignores the call with a furtive apology and they continue making their way down a random side street. It is nearly three in the morning, and he’s long since gifted her his suit jacket to combat the chill. Beneath it, she’s wearing a ruffled mini skirt and a thin white shirt. It’s the end of August chill carrying over the river that he thinks is the cause of her flush.

Noelle is retelling the story of her college friends who are all suddenly pregnant with something akin to fear in her tone when his phone rings again. He frowns at the ID -- it’s too early for this -- and apologizes, conceding that he has to answer. His broken French amuses her and she laughs, nodding for him to answer.

“This better be good, Dom,” Arthur warns.

“What day is it?” he asks instead, sounding hoarse and groggy.

“What do you mean, what day is it? You know we’re in different time zones, right?”

“Oh, yeah, no, don’t worry about it. Listen, I think I called you by accident, okay, we’ll talk again later.”

“Did you just wake up?”

“No, Arthur, of course not. I gotta get the kids, I’ll talk to you later, ok, bye.”

He hangs up before Arthur can reply and Arthur curses a little, heading a few steps ahead to call Miles. The old man answers with a series of annoyed French curses. “Miles,” he interrupts in English, “I’m really sorry to wake you, honestly, I know the time, I’m in Paris, too.”

“Oh, Arthur, how are you, darling? Why are you calling so late?”

“Dom just called me and he sounded really confused and disoriented. He calls me everyday but I haven’t heard from him in a few days. Listen, I can’t prove it but I think they’ve started dreaming days at a time and I’m worried. I’d check on him myself but I’m in the middle of a job.”

On the other line Miles starts cursing again and Arthur can hear him waking Marie. Arthur glances at Noelle and she looks beautiful, leaning against a fire hydrant. She yawns and Arthur looks sympathetic in her direction. She shrugs amicably.

“Arthur! Are you still there?”

“Yes, sorry.”

“Look, thank you for calling us darling, I’m going to look into it, but for now, don’t worry about him.”

“Alright, Miles. Thank you.”

He grunts something French in response and hangs up. Arthur hangs up too and glances around at their surroundings. He doesn’t recognize anything anymore. “Are we lost?”

Noelle shakes her head, “I’ve lived here my whole life, I can’t lose myself in this city.”

“You want to come back to my hotel?” Arthur considers her eyes, obscured without streetlights.

She nods. Noelle is an out-of-work structural engineer and gentleness shows in her every step. She’s passionate and well-adjusted and her laughter makes people turn their heads, Arthur has seen it. When they finally reach the hotel, exhausted and anxious with predictions for the night ahead, she surprises him. In the elevator to the Presidential Suite, she kisses him abruptly.

“I do not like tension,” she says by way of explanation and kisses him again. He melts against it and lets her lead the way, tugging him to the room. Inside, she undoes each of his shirt buttons, one at a time until his shirt slips off his arms, all while kissing him silent. “Arthur,” she purrs, undoing his belt.

He hums into her mouth, hugging her waist to keep the distance between them closed. He can barely breathe through his nose but it doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t realize he’s gasping for breath until she pulls away. “You know this is just for tonight, yeah?”

He blinks and has to pull himself out of it. “Yeah, why?”

“You are looking at me like you want to keep me. I am not to be kept.”

He considers her words but initiates another kiss, languorously searching her skin with his hands. He kneads softly at the small of her back and decides he wants her to keep the skirt on for the rest of the night. Finally, he answers, “I understand.”

“Good,” she says and then he’s lifting her up and carrying her to the bedroom.

Arthur doesn’t feed from Noelle, largely because he doesn’t have to. The other part is he doesn’t want to. Noelle is not to be kept, as she said, and if he shares consciousness with her while she’s sleeping, he will be able to call on her soul for as long as she lives. He only observes.

Noelle dreams about Arthur, weirdly enough, and navigating the cafe like a maze before the end opens into her favorite restaurant. She orders a pie but before she can eat it, someone is removing her course and adding another. She wants to argue for the food but ends up drifting out again and when her grandpa shows up suddenly, Arthur retreats. Noelle is navigating the course of some typical dreams and he doesn’t need to watch.

Meanwhile, five thousand miles away, Mal and Dom have dropped into Limbo again and even though it would be easy for Arthur to follow, he cannot risk the exposure. Instead he watches them create skyscrapers out of sand and forces the sundown to simulate nighttime. Mal and Dom sleep curled together in the sand. When he gets close, Arthur can see their faces have aged another thirty years.

Resting on his knees in the sand, he watches them sleep. His very presence is draining them, but for the time being he wants to remember them as they are. Mal, for her cunningness and ingenuity. Dom, for his wisdom and ambition. Arthur hasn’t been keeping track of how much he takes from them but if they’ve taken to aging in Limbo, it has to have been a lot.

He recedes from the dream and wakes up to Noelle making breakfast.

Arthur gets the call about Mal three weeks later, while he’s riding a commuter train from Paris to Nice. He’s angry and his body betrays it, retching on the conductor when he asks for a ticket.

-

Arthur flies to Los Angeles for the funeral and tells himself that’s all he came for. Miles is there to help Dom with the arrangements, Marie is there to watch after the children, and Mal’s extended family have all flown out to express their sympathies. It take six hours for everyone to leave and Arthur spends the entire time sitting in the corner of a room. He promises himself he is not waiting for a horsefly, and that even if one came around, he’d have to do what he always does.

The flight he and Dom are on afterwards is void of horse flies, too. The hotel rooms, the cities, and back alley drug deals, the bars, the prostitute corners, all void. Dom is self-destructive with his own grief and Arthur can’t even feed from him because he’s so unstable. But after a few months, they go on their first underground job and there she is.

Not a horsefly, not a soul, not Arthur’s creation, but Dom’s leech. She is not Mal by any means. The Shade is a version of Mal that Arthur made for Dom, chewed up and spit out by Arthur so many times that the teeth marks have disfigured her into Arthur’s likeness. She controls the dreams and hunts them through mazes, even pushing the boundaries of Arthur’s quartered conscious to slice him open.

She is everywhere they go and with each dream, Dom is drained a little more. Arthur doesn’t even realize it until they are practice dreaming in Japan for some energy conglomerate job and when he reaches out at night to feed from Nash, he finds a pulsing purple light, draining, running out. It takes two years of grief and dreaming with the Shade for it drain him.

It’s infuriating.

“You knew about this and went along with it!” Arthur hisses at Yusuf when Dom reveals how much he has drugged them. Arthur can get distracted from the needs and processes of his human body, but usually he can handle it. Today, even the sections of his consciousness that he allows into dreams are wavering with the weight of the drug. Yusuf tries to look meek and non-threatening but Arthur met him when he was violent and angry and the years don’t change a person quite that much. “You trusted him! What, when he promised you half his share?”

“No,” Yusuf says, and for a second that violent glint shows in his eyes again, the mischief and youth, the same smile he wears for Lila, “His whole share.”

A long time ago, before the Fischer job, before the Saito job, before Arthur even met Dom, he met Yusuf in an alley in Mombasa. He was beating another kid for lunch money, and Arthur wore a different face then, but he never forgot what Yusuf said to him and Yusuf never forgot what the rush felt like. “All’s fair...”

When the room clears, with Eames running after Dom to keep yelling at him, Arthur shoves Yusuf against the workbench Saito is laying on. “All’s fair, right?”

Yusuf giggles, his fake unassuming giggle. “What!”

Beside him Saito moans. “Look, honestly, I don’t give a fuck, but you could have warned me.”

Yusuf scoffs at him, “And you could have warned everyone else that Fischer’s mind is militarized. We both know you had access to that information. But all’s fair, right, princess?”

Arthur rolls his eyes and leans forward with his elbows on the workbench. Saito moans softly in his sleep, a foot or so away. “Ugh,” Arthur complains, “Okay, forget it. This job is such a fucking mess. What are we going to do about this son of a bitch?”

“What do you mean what are we going to do? You are going to Jaws of Life him!”

“What?” Arthur straightens, prepared to defend his jaws but Yusuf cuts him off.

“Listen, do you remember that time we were in the den and you gave that couple more time?”

“That is possibly the vaguest sentence you’ve ever said to me.”

“No, remember!” Yusuf taps him on the arm, insistent, “The old lesbian couple from my den, that dreamt about when they were young! Asha had cancer and you saw it when you were there and Imani was going to live only a year longer, long enough to die of her misery. So, you transferred some of Imani’s energy into Asha. Now they’re going to die together. You said it was the least you could do.”

“Oh, Asha and Imani!” Arthur exclaims. “Yeah, they were great.”

Yusuf purses his lips, annoyed. “Well, Saito is the richest man on the Eastern hemisphere and his death will have the entire Asian continent hunting us. Not just hunting, either, they’ll hang us. You’ve got to work your kiss of life shit, chant or sing, or whatever you need to do, but we need this son of bitch alive.”

“Wait.” Arthur considers his options. “Let’s say I agree with you, it’s not that simple. Asha and Imani were married for years, they would have done anything for each other, their energies were compatible. Only one person here is compatible with Saito and that son of a bitch is just about dead already.”

“Who?”

Arthur doesn’t have to search for lights to know, Dom has been pulsing in darker plums as of late, but a couple of tugs more and even the plum will drain. “Cobb.”

In the other room, Cobb is arguing with Ariadne over arbitrary details about how to interrogate Fischer. Eames is sweeping the perimeter of the warehouse, scoping out snipers. For his part, Fischer has been silent in a room down the hall. Meanwhile, Saito is the richest man on two hemispheres on a given day and his consciousness is waning. If Dom dies, there will be a gaggle of sobbing family members as a result, but if Saito dies the complications will be catastrophic for all of them, and for Dreamshare. But more importantly, for Arthur.

“Oh, well. Dom’s an egomaniac anyway, if he knew, he’d be delirious with the romantic trope he’s fallen into. Besides, he’s been following after Mal’s Shade since we left LA, he’s gone off the deep end.” Arthur reaches out for Saito and sifts distractedly through his potential timeline. He will live if Arthur intervenes, but the detailed outcomes are much farther reaching and Arthur doesn’t care to investigate them. ”She’ll probably be here eventually.”

“Then why have you been following him?” Yusuf says, leaning against the workbench. “Aching to get a glimpse of the ghost?”

Arthur scowls but the set of his mouth never quite reaches the edge he’s aiming for. “Go watch the door, if anyone tries to come in, tell them I’m changing my clothes or something.”

“Yeah, whatever.” He starts to walk away and comes back. “Wait, how do you know Dom will work if Asha and Imani were together for years before they were compatible?”

“No, you’ve got it backwards, Asha and Imani were together for years because of their compatibility. In the accessible future, Cobb and Saito will have a similar opportunity in a different context. Look, it doesn’t matter, I know what I’m doing. Go watch the door.”

Yusuf scoffs but leaves finally.

Arthur stands over Saito with a hand on his chest, feeling for the steady beat of his pulse. The hum of his heartbeat is slow and murmured but Arthur finds it and pulls it into himself, reaching simultaneously for the staccato beat of Dom’s. They meet through him and in the distance somewhere, Dom must feel his chest ache because the flow of it stutters like it wants to resist. It’s useless to do so, Arthur is much stronger. He feeds it slowly into Saito and Dom’s light dims just a little more. Saito’s pulses a little clearer, a shade of rich emerald.

When he opens his eyes, Saito is looking up at him with gratitude. It’s possible he wasn’t entirely asleep during Arthur and Yusuf’s conversation. His mouth forms words but Arthur can’t hear it before Dom comes bursting in with ski masks and shotguns.

-

Ariadne has a bright young face and soft eyes and even though he sneaked a kiss out of her in the second level of the dream, Arthur’s not actually interested in her. The second she wakes up, she spins around and tells him the rest of what happened in Limbo. Or what she saw. In a way, he’s relieved. In another way, he’s annoyed. Dom _would_ make up with his grief and self-destruction once Arthur has finally decided to put him out of his misery.

Arthur’s leaning against the luggage carousel, being relatively annoyed at Dom’s departing back, when he feels a hand on his shoulder. Distantly, he thinks maybe he should feel glad that the entire Cobb mess will be over soon. His thoughts focus, however, because the hand on his shoulder is that of a TSA agent. His name is Jonathan and he will die in thirty years after he develops an alcohol problem.

“Monsieur, I’d like to ask you to come with me.”

“Is there a problem, officer?”

“You must come to the security office to discuss the matter openly.”

“And if I refuse?”

Jonathan, his grandmother calls him Nathan, frowns at Arthur like he doesn’t want to argue instead of answering. Arthur shrugs. Always one adventure to another. “Lead the way.”

Jonathan leads him through a series of winding hallways, occasionally nodding in greeting to other TSA agents. He doesn’t offer any polite conversation and Arthur doesn’t care for it anyway, so they walk in silence. Eventually, the doors open out and Jonathan is encouraging Arthur onto another airfield.

“Monsieur Saito is waiting,” he says cryptically, and then shuts the door behind Arthur.

Saito’s jet is sitting in the center of the airfield. There’s a man dressed in a black suit standing at the bottom of the staircase and as Arthur approaches, he jogs up to take Arthur’s coat and luggage. “What’s this about?”

The young man simply responds, “Mr. Saito will be with you shortly.”

Arthur thanks him and heads up to the jet. “So Monsieur Saito wasn’t waiting, Jonathan.”

As Arthur steps inside, the flight attendant offers a series of chilled beverages and when he refuses, takes her leave. Shortly thereafter, the pilot leaves too. Arthur wanders back and forth between the cockpit and the lounge area. There’s a bar, a few seats, a few tables, and a suit jacket thrown over the back of a chair. Arthur doesn’t have to get up close to recognize a Tom Ford.

He's admiring the impeccable stitching when Saito climbs aboard and pauses in the doorway. "Mr. Arthur, thank you for joining me. What do you think? Should you like to fly back to Paris with me or just get on a ship? Personally, I don’t feel partial to either.”

Arthur is already regretting his good deed of keeping the man alive. These moguls and their power struggle games. “Sleeping through the entire flight is a great way to miss it.”

“You’re right. We’ll fly. It’d be silly not to." Saito clicks his tongue softly and the pilot appears behind him instantly. "I want to be out of this country in ten minutes."

The pilot frantically beckons the crew before heading into the cockpit. Arthur's not worried. He can bring the plane down with a flick of his wrist. "Saito," he says and it sounds like a threat but Saito doesn't look concerned.

"Sit," he commands. "We need to talk."

Their conversation winds into the syllabic shift of language over distance. 30,000 feet of air pressure carries into their speech. Saito knows about Arthur’s ability but spends some time evading the topic. They are somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, six hours into their twelve hour flight when Arthur finally gets bored. There’s a horsefly sitting inside the cargo hold, somehow aiming remarkably close to Arthur and still missing, but it’s buzzing is louder than the engine crank and it’s giving him a headache.

“What do you want?”

Saito looks pleasantly surprised by the turn in conversation. “To make you rich.”

-

Their first job together is in Osaka, with all the eyes of Saito’s security team turned away from them. Saito sits sitting in an armchair next to the bed and Arthur is sitting beside their target while he sleeps. The mark is a young stockbroker who knows a mole in one of the top business moguls in Kyoto but has somehow managed to leave no trace of his insider trading. Saito is sitting with a gun in his lap. “Tell me what you see.”

His family name is Park and his death will come in six months, when his partners will betray him. Arthur doesn’t have to open his timeline to know that, he just saw his dreams. Park is militarized but that means very little when it comes to Arthur’s ability. “He’s underwater, dreaming of swimming without coming up for air. There are fish in all colors and sizes, corals, the shadow of a whale group in the distance. There’s a man with yakuza tattoos swimming beside him, he’s got a rope around Park’s neck. When Park swims too far forward, the yakuza chokes him back.”

“Can you change his dreams?” Saito asks. “Direct them?”

“I can make him dream good dreams and bad dreams but I can’t build them without a PASIV.”

“Give him nightmares.”

“How bad?”

Saito sits up straighter, “How bad can you make them?”

Arthur laughs. He sprinkles fear and panic into Park’s mind and the underwater dream turns into an intense drowning nightmare. Arthur keeps Park inside his dream, forcing him to stay unconscious until the dream ends. The next sequence is in a dark cell that is not tall enough for Park to sit up in. Arthur stands over him with his true face and Park is too delirious with hunger in the dream to realize Arthur is not a hallucination.

It doesn’t take much to interrogate him. Arthur conjures Park’s fear, opens his mind and all the marbles spill out like apples. The mole is Boss Nakamura’s nephew, who works as an Executive in his uncle’s company. “It’s Ryu.”

Arthur slips his human skin back on and takes a second to reorient himself. When he looks up, Saito is watching him with an unreadable expression. There’s a thick, silver gun in his lap and if it shifted ten degrees to the left, it wouldn’t be pointed at Arthur, but for now, technically it is.

“Nakamura Ryu,” Saito repeats.

Arthur raises an eyebrow. “Surprised?”

The gun, a .50 AE Desert Eagle Mark XIX, slides lower on Saito’s thigh as he sits forward. When he speaks, Arthur thinks he’s supposed to feel vindicated, but it mostly sounds like a challenge. “No.”

He can’t help the laugh that gurgles in his throat, and can’t help it, weeks later, when Saito’s security start answering to him, and he can’t help it when he skyrockets into the promised wealth. Mal and Dom’s horror story is left behind and Arthur gets whisked up in Saito’s cyclone.

-

Arthur wakes up on a marble floor in a model’s bathroom in Beijing. The model, Xixin, is asleep on the couch in the living room, and there are four strangers in her bed. He steals someone else’s black suit jacket, because his is covered in puke, which is not even something Arthur lets his human body do, and he takes the elevator up to the Penthouse. There are two security guards posted at the door and when they stop Arthur to frisk him, he rolls his eyes.

“We both know I’m armed, stop touching me and let me in.”

As if on cue, the door opens and Saito sticks his head out. Saito doesn’t even speak and they move away instantly. Arthur rolls his eyes at them and makes his way into the room. Inside the Beijing skyline sprawls through across the room through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Saito welcomes him inside, a red silk robe open to his bare chest and tailored slacks. He smells like honey lemon tea and beckons Arthur into the dining room, distractedly. “Good morning.”

There are glasses perched on his nose, sleek and dark, and he peers over them to read a newspaper folded haphazardly in his hand. At the table, he scoffs and finally sets it aside. His glasses come off in one stroke and he finally acknowledges Arthur’s presence. “How was your night?”

Arthur shrugs, already digging into the spread of breakfast food. “Fine, I met the model, but she doesn’t know anything about Liu’s expansion plans.”

“Did you dream with her?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Arthur stops eating to shrug off his stolen suit jacket. “I didn’t share a dream with her. When she fell asleep, I saw her dreams and felt around a little.”

“And you have nothing to show for it?”

“That’s not what I said." Arthur pauses sipping from his glass of water. Saito is watching him with an impatient gaze. “I said she doesn’t know anything. But she wouldn’t. The model is Liu’s illegitimate daughter, not his lover. His lover is actually a young man named Muhammad, from Jordan. They met in the States, that’s where we’ll find him. Upper East Side, New York City.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I got Xixin talking and thinking about it, then she dreamt about his apartment. It’s better than hers in Nanking. She’s bitter about it.”

Saito hums, now disinterested and absorbing his attention in his breakfast. Arthur watches him eat, mildly amused by the absolute grace in his every gesture and forgets his own meal in the process. He doesn’t have to feed his body much anyway. When Saito is bored with breakfast, he stands abruptly. “To the US again, then,” he sounds annoyed.

Arthur pushes food around on his plate, “You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to.”

Saito sighs and slips off his robe, “I know that much, Arthur, but after this morning’s news, I feel compelled to enter the country again.”

“What news?”

Saito pauses mid-stride across the room. He’s heading towards the crisp white shirt hanging off the doorknob. “You don’t know?”

Arthur pushes his breakfast away and sits back. “Know what?”

“Mr. Cobb died last night.”

“What?”

“He committed suicide in the exact same manner as his late wife.”

“Oh.”

Saito nods, standing still in the middle of the room, still shirtless. He looks smaller without shoes on but somehow still dominates over the room. In the sunlight peeking through the building, his chest is golden brown and his eyes shine like copper. Arthur chews his tongue for a moment, unsure of how to proceed. “I need to make a call,” he decides finally and heads out of the suite.

Arthur’s room is downstairs and he takes the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, skipping two at a time. His room guards wave him in with simple gestures and Arthur does his best to ignore them. He sheds his jacket and his tie, rolling up his sleeves while he hunts for the cheap mobile he bought at the airport. It’s tucked between the toaster and the blender for some ungodly reason and Arthur dials while he runs the shower.

“Speak of the Devil and he will appear,” Yusuf greets.

“Should my ears be ringing?”

“I wouldn’t know, have you developed a hearing problem in your old age?”

Arthur tucks that zinger away with a mental note to get Yusuf back for it. “Did you hear the news?”

Yusuf sighs, dropping the light tone. “Yes, that’s actually why I was just thinking of calling you. You wouldn’t believe how quickly Ariadne got on a plane.”

“Fuck.”

“Quite.”

“Where are you?”

“Oh, no, Arthur, no way in hell I’m going out there, you pillock, I’m on vacation. If you want to stop the girl, chase after her yourself. Besides, as I hear it, these days, your Sugar Daddy has more than enough airlines for you to utilize.”

“Sugar Daddy,” Arthur repeats in question but then Saito appears in the doorway of his bathroom. In a strange mirror of their circumstances upstairs, he is dressed in a three-piece gray suit and Arthur is barefoot and shirtless. “Right.”

“Isn’t this mortal coil just so strange?”

“Goodbye.” Arthur hangs up and Saito raises an eyebrow as if demanding a status update. “Let me shower and then we’ll get going.”

Saito nods, albeit without excitement. “I loathe Los Angeles.”

His tone is soft with exhaustion and a twinge of jet lag. Arthur can hear it in his heart beat and when Saito dreams, the vast nightmare beaches more than explain his disdain for the West coast. Still, Saito will not die for a long time and it has everything to do with the scope of his power. “Let me shower,” Arthur repeats and Saito turns to him with a lidded gaze. “I am not stopping you.”

Arthur considers his options and leans against the glass shower wall. His hands drop the belt of his pants, opening the buckle as he talks, “You want to hear something interesting?”

“If you insist.”

“People think I am your kept boy.” Arthur pulls the belt through it’s loops, ”And you’re my sugar daddy.”

Saito looks unconcerned and says nothing, watching Arthur remove the last of his clothes, before stepping in the shower. He stands under the spray of water, rubbing a kink out of his neck until Saito steps inside. He doesn’t turn to face him, just revels in Saito’s hands coming around to stroke his hips and his dick. Saito kisses his neck and sucks on Arthur’s earlobe until Arthur’s body is flushed with arousal. One hand stroking the head of his cock and the other tracing over his pulse, Saito turns Arthur’s head back to kiss him.

Under the damp heat of Saito’s palm, Arthur’s heart is racing.

-

Eames is in LA, drowning himself in dreams of belly dancers and lipstick-stained wine glasses. Arthur stands inside his dreams and drinks it in. Eames is in a belly dancing restaurant as his female forgery. The room is full of women. Men are the dancers, instead. Arthur enters the restaurant from the kitchen and makes his way through the room with no suspicion from his projections.

Dominic’s death has been ruled a suicide by the coroner, largely due to Dom’s legal history and a note he left for his children on the dresser of the room. Arthur finds it mildly ironic, considering that if Dom had waited a few weeks, he would have died in some other less gruesome manner. Arthur practically drained him the last time they saw each other. Dom wasn’t going to last.

When Arthur approaches Eames, he turns her face towards him to acknowledge his presence. He’s not wearing his human face, and she laughs, a bubbly giggle forming in her throat and solidifying as he starts to eat her alive. Her laughter bursts in spirals and when Arthur’s finished, her shimmer collapses and Eames is all that is left.

“If I was going to do it,” Eames says, red lips curving around his rough accent, “what would I use?”

At the table, there is a series of weapons. There’s a gun, a few different types of knives, an axe, a noose, coiled barbed wire, a pile of pills, and a simple razorblade. Eames’ poker chip totem is at the end of the table. “How would I do it?”

Eames has always been so predictable. Arthur sprinkles joy into his dreams and leaves his light behind to beat a sky blue color.

The funeral has a decent turn out, with both Mal and Dom’s family coming out to support the kids. The children end up going home with Dom’s mom, who lives in Anaheim, and is much more capable of chasing after James and Phillipa than Miles and Marie. Yusuf doesn’t show, claiming to still be on vacation. Eames is there, looking tired and sleepless, speaking to Ariadne in hushed whispers.

Saito watches the entire occasion with a detached gaze and sits forward in his pew to ask, “Why don’t you just kill her?”

Ten months later, in Tokyo, Arthur will ask himself that very question. “I don’t know,” he says out loud. Saito is pacing the veranda, on hold for the principal at his daughter’s school. “That’s all I do.”

“Kill people?”

“Administer death.”

“Yes, hello, Dr. Kim,” Saito says into the phone, “I’m going to be sending a car to retrieve my daughter from the school tonight. As you know, it is her birthday month and so we will be out of the country for two weeks following. I hope you can make the appropriate arrangements with her teachers and arrange her assignments. Takeko is already informed of our trip and should be prepared to depart tonight. Yes, thank you. Good afternoon,” he says summarily and hangs up.

“If I wanted to kill somebody,” Arthur says, “I’d take this book and beat you to death with it and I wouldn’t feel a thing. It’d be just like walking to the drugstore.”

Saito fixes him with an unimpressed gaze, leaning against the rails of the balcony. “Say again, Matsunaga Futoshi. I was on the phone. It feels like what?”

“Boring.” Arthur concludes, and almost repeats the Charles Manson quote but instead shakes it off. He’s meeting Saito’s fifteen-year old daughter soon and then the three of them will spend two weeks in Puerto Rico, vacationing. “It doesn’t matter. Ariadne can hire as many private investigators as she wants, I can still bring an end to the arrangement whenever I want.”

“Why not now?”

Arthur tilts his head up at Saito. “I’m bored.”

Saito stills his hand, idly peeling the chair’s stitching, and tugs on it for Arthur to stand. Arthur follows his lead and occupies his mind with the pull of Saito’s. It hums gentler than most people’s and glows an emerald color in Arthur’s dimension. “What if she doesn’t like PR?”

“She’s spoken highly of the country in the past.”

“What if she doesn't like me?”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

Arthur doesn’t have a good excuse for that one and is willing to admit as such until Saito pulls him into an affectionate embrace. His hands are warm at the small of Arthur’s back, kneading softly to alleviate the tension Arthur carries there. He leans into the heat and closes his eyes, enjoying himself for a fraction of a second.

When he opens his eyes, there are three horse flies on the balcony railing. A migraine blooms in the back of his head, so sharp his body is paralyzed to breathe.

 _What if I kill her_ , he wonders, but cannot bring himself verbalize.

-

Arthur is not Arthur.

Arthur’s body was not born of a uterus or the Earth. His hair grows and his fingernails grow and the fucking horsefly headaches can make him pass out sometimes but it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t belong to his identity. He is fragmented across dimensional planes and wherever he stands is where he lives.

Arthur can open timelines and cut them apart or stitch them together but there are fixed points that burn to touch. There’s no benefactor impeding him from using his human body however he wants. There is no one on the other end of the doorway, only a veil that Arthur can't touch. There’s only horseflies that pulse until he can’t ignore them, time folding over him whenever he gets too comfortable, and that’s all. He can live on one plane of existence, make connections, and fuck like other humans but he’ll reap them all eventually. Arthur can stay for now, but death is all he knows and all he expects.

Arthur hates to admit it but there are times when his body is exhausted, the horse flies come through the veil. Sometimes one, sometimes more, but always with blood-red eyes and angry voices. Mal’s horsefly hardly hums, it drills, and in his exhausted sleep, he’s too far gone to stop it. She’s been dead for four and a half years when she steps through the veil her final time. She says, “Haven’t you had enough?” and laughs as Arthur banishes her beyond.

Topside, over dinner at another empty, nameless restaurant, miles between their minds but a foot between bodies, reaching the space and time they allocate to meet upon, is when it’s worse. Arthur wants to leave because to stay means Saito’s death at a quicker pace.

It’s in the nature of Arthur’s being to consume, and if he stays, nothing he encounters can be spared.

-

Mombasa air breathes like a ripe heaven after the row of flights to get there. Arthur stretches his legs and leaves the bags to be carried by one of the many boys who tend to Saito. Yusuf is driving a golf cart onto the airfield and skids to a stop right in front of Arthur. On his right, there’s a blonde girl with a lollipop in her mouth and oversized sunglasses.

“Hey there, good looking,’ Yusuf hollers.

“Good morning,” Arthur replies, pulling his own sunglasses off his shirt to wear them on his face. “I’m Arthur, it’s nice to meet you.”

“Sierra,” the girl replies with a winning smile.

“Sierra’s a model,” Yusuf pitches in, competitively. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“My partner,” Arthur replies sharply, “is in the jet, on a call, and will join us in a minute. Then we can leave for brunch in a real car.”

“I’m hurt that you would say that. Golf carts have engines. They exist on this plane, they are real.”

Arthur can see the molecules and atoms that form everything and it’s held together by not even a thin thread. In response, he rolls his eyes as Yusuf and waves to the driver pulling up. Tariq steps out, apologizing furiously for his tardiness. Arthur claps him on the back, “No worries, we were just leaving.”

"Is this your partner’s driver?”

“In Mombasa, yes. Tariq, this is Yusuf and Sierra.”

He greets them shortly with a nod. Sierra raises an eyebrow, “You hire different drivers for different cities?”

“My partner likes to support local businesses.”

Yusuf bursts into laughter. “But not global ones, right?”

Arthur shrugs, revealing nothing, and Tariq turns back to the car.

Saito finally appears from the jet then, talking in hushed tones to the pilot. When they get to the bottom of the staircase, Saito stops, sending the pilot back up into the plane with a flick of his wrist, and proceeds to join them. “Mr. Yusuf,” he greets calmly. “Always a pleasure. And who is this beautiful young woman?”

“My supplier, Sierra.”

“Supplier?” Arthur says and wishes he hadn’t because Sierra is patronizing with that same indulgent look Lila gave him. She’s a drug runner. “Oh.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Saito, I’ve heard wonderful things of you both,” she says charmingly, using a long manicured nail to pull a lock of hair away from her sticky lipgloss. “I’ve been looking forward to this brunch for some time.”

Saito frowns and clicks his tongue mournfully, oozing social etiquette. “Then I am terribly sorry to disappoint. Some urgent business has come up and Arthur and I must head to Morocco on business.”

She mirrors his expression and smiles, placating. “Oh, of course, not to worry about a thing. I’m in Mombasa vacationing for three weeks, we’d be happy to fit you in any time before my departure.”

“Unless,” Saito says, suddenly smirking mischievously.

Yusuf glances at Arthur over his sunglasses, wary expression on his face.

“Would you like to join us in Rabat for the weekend? My treat.”

Sierra gasps and looks back at Yusuf, mouth turned up in an excited question. Arthur looks over her shoulder at Saito, curious to find his expression completely calm. Distantly, he wonders what is in Morocco that can’t wait for five days. Yusuf sighs as if relenting, but his mouth is tugging with a grin. “Why not?”

The plane has enough fuel for another ten hour flight and so they head up immediately thereafter. The flight itself is surprisingly calm. Yusuf puts himself out with a sleeping pill and Sierra falls asleep listening to music on her phone.

In their bedroom, Arthur turns to Saito kisses the inside of his palm, and asks. “So what’s the job?”

“A fetus that stands to inherit too much should it be born.”

“We’re going to stop that?”

“We’re going to remove its inheritance.”

“Okay,” Arthur flops on the bed and settles. “I’m curious, though. Why did you invite them with us if you wanted to work?”

“They will only be joining us for a weekend holiday, Arthur,” Saito replies, joining him on the bed, back against the headboard. “Why, did I overstep a boundary?”

Arthur thinks he knows but sometimes his human body bleeds louder than the horseflies. “No, not at all. I’m just curious as to what compelled you.”

“Oh you know,” Saito teases, “Only my compulsory spending habits, as you have so aptly named them.”

Arthur looks over at him, “I never said compulsory, but you did make a billion dollar purchase once so we could sit undisturbed in first class. You _do_ own ten motorcycles that you don’t drive.”

“Extenuating circumstances,” Saito chimes, “And those bikes are for Takeko and her friends, should they ever want them.”

“Reasonable purchase for a group of teenagers,” Arthur says and laughs at him, ‘But seriously, why did you invite them?”

Saito looks confused, almost. “Does it matter anymore?”

“What?”

“The other day, when you touched the cobblestones on a street and told me a man died there once, fifteen hundred years ago. Does his death matter now still? Do the reasons for it affect the way I live my life?” Arthur opens his mouth to reply, but Saito keeps going. “Will my death matter to you in fifteen hundred years? Or will you just know the facts of the past as they are?”

"We’re talking about something that happened an hour ago, not fifteen hundred years."

"It may as well be to you."

“Saito.” Arthur says. “Stop. Just tell me.”

Saito crawls forward, deft and fluid in his movements, catching Arthur by surprise as he straddles him. “Mr. Yusuf is your friend, Arthur, or the closest anyone living has come to it, and you are my partner, so he should be my friend too.”

Arthur is somewhat surprised by his answer, but does nothing to show it. “Was that so hard?”

Saito brushes their noses together, stealing the breath from Arthur’s body in sharp kisses. When they part, he says, “Remember this, fifteen hundred years from now.”

Arthur intends to.

-

He waits until the light in his dreams starts to fade. When they met, it was a rich emerald color, beating steadily in its corner. By the time a couple of years have passed, it has already darkened into dark olive green. He waits until he can’t anymore and then waits again. Saito can never know he did this for him so he needs to be careful and take his time.

Arthur boards a plane to do a job in Pakistan, where Eames set the position up for him. He waits a couple of weeks, doing his usual job, collecting information on the mark, discussing strategy, evading team bonding bonding exercises, etc. Eames doesn’t suspect anything and Yusuf is far away enough that even if Eames reported his suspicions, Arthur would still have a 24 hour window to act before Yusuf was in the country. Same goes for Saito, whom Eames says about, “Didn’t bring your lover then?”

Arthur, leaving the office for the night, pulls his jacket on in wide gestures. It brushes Eames’ chest and he steps back to accommodate Arthur’s demand for space. “He’s a busy man.”

Eames sucks his teeth. “Sent out his best lap dog, though, didn’t he?”

The office is empty for the night, which is really what Arthur was hoping for. He turns on his heel to address Eames, chest out. “Do you have something to say to me?”

Eames shrugs, pretending to be calm with tension bunched in his shoulders. If Arthur was human, he wouldn’t stand much of a chance in this fight. “Can’t think of a thing, darling.”

“Then shut your mouth,” Arthur spits, and turns to walk away again.

He’s striding across the room when Eames calls back to him. “Actually, it’s all coming to me know. Your best friends died and you fucked off with your boyfriend to play kept man.”

Arthur stops and turns, cooling his expression into a bored gaze. Eames continues, “Your best friends died in the worst ways possible, under great stress, and both times, you were nowhere to be found. Ariadne tried to reach you a hundred different times and a hundred different ways but it doesn’t matter even the slightest to you, does it? Happy to have the load off your chest, weren’t you?”

Arthur has had nothing but pressure on his chest since Mal died but Eames doesn’t need to know that. “Is that why you called me for this job? To ambush me?”

“No,” Eames says, “I just wanted to see if it was true that you’re only after the money.”

“What’s the verdict?”

“Well, you’re here, aren’t you?”

He says two things to Eames, to end the conversation. “Fuck you.”

Eames looks livid at that, revealing the power in his arms with an angry hand coiling into a fist at his side.

He fishes into his pocket for his office keys and tosses them out onto the floor between them. Arthur also says, “I quit.”

In his timeline, Arthur has seen, Eames will drive to his hotel angrily and call Ariadne to confer with her. He will not call Yusuf until he sees that Arthur is actually gone, in three days. Yusuf will not call Saito, partially because he doesn’t especially care. Saito will call Yusuf, actually, in a week, and by then, well. It will be too late. Arthur is tempted to follow Eames and make sure he heads home but he doesn’t have much time, and so instead, he heads back to his hotel.

Without Saito around, there’s no need for Arthur to have men posted at the door, so he’s alone at his room that night. He undresses himself inside and sits on the edge of the bed in a pair of boxers. Stepping away from the humanity in him, he finds himself immersed in his dimension, to the view of a feast of lights before him. Eames is glowing still, in his hotel room, no more than five miles away. Yusuf and Ariadne are in the corner of his vision. There are five lights glowing nearby and this is exactly what he prepared them for.

Saito’s light has been beating a dark olive for some time now and the thought of it ever going out is baffling to Arthur. He focuses his omnipotent rage on the five lights. Eventually, Saito will know about this. Eventually, he’ll learn about this process and be enraged at Arthur’s naivety.

But for now, Arthur draws the lights up into him, draining five human beings at once. It feels like stepping underwater for the sudden surge of pressure leaves him dumbfounded. Arthur wades into the light and reaps and reaps until they’re going out. He carries it across to Saito’s conduit and pours it all inside in a slow funnel. It falls through seamlessly, like Arthur isn’t using his influence to paint the life as compatible with Saito.

At the end of the fourth, he closes Saito’s conduit, and consumes the light for himself. These are all people Arthur opened and vetted personally for this purpose. He tricked them into dreams and opened them up. Once he’s seen their dreams, after all, no distance can stop him from feeding off them.

Inside his eyes, Saito’s light is growing brighter and beating at a different pace. Using his human body as a middleman between random people and those who are compatible with Saito worked. And the fifth soul is replenishing his body very well.

Arthur leaves his rage and re-enters his body. It’s exhausted with the grind of a long week but he doesn’t have time to rest. Arthur makes himself get up, get dressed, and disappear. He’s got a week’s worth of a head start and it’s a good amount of time to get a leg up but Saito should not be underestimated. If he really wants to find Arthur, he could turn the Earth inside out.

It’s not that Saito wouldn’t leave him if Arthur asked. It’s that Arthur can’t bring himself to ask. He doesn’t know that he can look Saito in the eye and keep himself composed. Or that he even deserves to assume it would mean anything to Saito. He’s got half of the globe in his pocket, he’ll do fine without Arthur.

Arthur is wondering about his chances while he packs. He packed light when he left Tokyo but now it seems he’s got to pack even lighter. Before he leaves, he stops in the doorway of the room and checks to see if he’s missed anything. He hasn’t.

-

It takes one linear year.

Noelle’s death comes during the winter. Arthur flies out for the funeral, wearing thick coats and earmuffs to protect his body from the Parisian winter. Other than the clothes on his back and his forged passports, there is little else he brought with him. He’s catching a flight out of Paris at midnight and after that, it’s back to tropical weathers. He grabs the first cab he sees and heads for the funeral home.

It’s hot inside with the breathing bodies of over a hundred people. Arthur moves through the crowd, knowing he doesn’t belong here, and doesn’t plan on staying long. There is a man with a small boy at his hip near the coffin. Noelle leaves behind an equally beautiful husband and a son. Her parents are there to grieve, as are her grandparents, and her cousins. Her friends look numb to the room, sitting in the second row, a few with bored-looking toddlers of their own.

The room is quiet but for the sound of whispered talking and non-distinct sobbing. Arthur looks around for the source but it could be any number of people with their head in their hands. He greets anyone who will shake his hand. At the front, he blesses her son with happy dreams for weeks into the future. Her husband asks how he knew her and Arthur replies, “We worked together at a cafe. We hadn’t spoken in some time, but when I got word, I came to pay my respects. Noelle was a wonderful human being.”

He nods. “Thank you.”

Noelle’s hair has grown out, a pillow of coiled, black hair. He touches her arm and opens himself to her horsefly, keeping his human form on so she won’t be frightened. She laughs when she sees where they are, relieved. “Everyone came to see me.”

“You were loved.”

“Am I moving on now?”

Arthur nods, brushing a stray hair out of her face. “Don’t be afraid.”

“So quickly?” Noelle’s brow is furrowed, “I just got here.”

“This is only a step along the way. Everything here will be fine. It’s time for you to rest.”

Noelle looks between Arthur and her husband, a worried expression on her face, but Arthur can sense that she’s ready to move on. “Will he be okay?”

Arthur nods minutely and uses his influence to pull her towards the veil. “Don’t worry about us.”

She passes through calm and collected. Once she has disappeared beyond the veil, Arthur walks away, collecting his hung up coats and scarves by the coat check at the door. As soon as he walks outside, he is assaulted with the cold and pulls his jackets closer together, shivering feebly.

Saito is leaning against the side of a town car, frowning in Arthur’s direction. The guards are both posted at the front of the car, pretending to be completely absent from the moment. He’s holding a cigarette, which is something Arthur never saw him do before. “What a surprise,” he says lightly.

Saito smiles at him, the secret, private one that curves his mouth but doesn’t show in his eyes. “I doubt I surprised you.”

Arthur’s body smirks a little. “You didn’t.”

“Can we talk in private?”

Arthur’s smirk slips, and he looks around, cataloging the exits from this conversation. There are quite a few, but he shouldn’t have to employ them for this. “That’s not a good idea.”

Saito straightens, flicking ash off the cigarette. “Why not?”

“There’s a reason I left and talking isn’t going to change it.”

Saito nods like he understands but says, “I have to try.”

Arthur steps closer, a small yielding gesture. “Try.”

Saito drags from the cigarette and exhales smoke as he talks, voice quiet with grief. “I’m going to die someday, Arthur. Regardless of where you are on the globe, I’m going to die. Maybe it comes faster because you’re with me, maybe it comes faster because of this cigarette. To me, it doesn’t matter, because I know it’s coming.”

Arthur pockets his hands to protect them from the cold. He’s only human after all. “So?”

Saito flicks the cigarette butt to the ground. “So come with me, too. Stay with me.”

Arthur has seen the timelines and he knows they’ll meet again but linear time is arduous and he wishes it would come faster. Saito won’t die for another decade or two and even then, he’ll have to move through the veil. But he’s in Arthur’s head and in his mind. Everything he sees reminds him of Saito. When he misses him, Arthur smells his cologne in the air.

Arthur wants to say yes, so he knows that he can’t.

“No,” he promises and knows he’ll see Saito again.

The next time they do, he will be at peace.


End file.
